Menu

Daily Archives: 20 Jul 2005

Each book in “For Pittsburgh” has about 450,000 characters, and will take about 20 hours, on average, to cycle through the LED tubes. Each side of the display has about 750 tubes stretching from the bottom edge of the convention center’s roof up to its peak. The letters, about 3-foot-high-by-1-foot-wide, scroll vertically up the horizontal tubes, which are about 2 inches wide, 14 inches long and spaced about 7 inches…

Such are but a few of the reasons I make errors of fact, not regularly but often enough to provoke eternal vigilance. What I hope my students get out of analyzing their professor’s foibles is that everyone — they, I, the authors of textbooks, the president, Nobel Prize winners, and so on — makes mistakes. The crucial questions are why the mistakes are made, and what is to be done…

Doohan, whose role was immortalised in the line “Beam me up, Scotty”, had been suffering from pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease, his agent said. —Star Trek’s Scotty dies aged 85 (BBC) Just as Sherlock Holmes never said, “It’s elementary, my dear Watson,” nobody in the original show ever said “Beam me up, Scotty,” but that’s OK. (Favorite line: “It’s… green.”) Scotty was definitely my favorite character when I was a kid. I…